My dad showed me this mechanical analog calculator called a slide rule. It was used during the early Pleistocene era. It's how they built the pyramids.
Your Dad was lucky to have a slide rule. My dad had stone tablets with all mathematical calculations carved into it by the babylonians to plot the path of the stars in heavens. And his dad had to approximate long division using sticks and bundles of sticks...
(apologies and ob. reference to Monty Python... the mother of all 'we had it toof in my day' riffs)
Michael Palin: Ahh.. Very passable, this, very passable.
Graham Chapman: Nothing like a good glass of Chateau de Chassilier wine, ay Gessiah?
Terry Gilliam: You're right there Obediah.
Eric Idle: Who'd a thought thirty years ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?
MP: Aye. In them days, we'd a' been glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.
GC: A cup ' COLD tea.
EI: Without milk or sugar.
TG: OR tea!
MP: In a filthy, cracked cup.
EI: We never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
GC: The best WE could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
TG: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
MP: Aye. BECAUSE we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness."
EI: 'E was right. I was happier then and I had NOTHIN'. We used to live in this tiiiny old house, with greaaaaat big holes in the roof.
GC: House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!
TG: You were lucky to have a ROOM! *We* used to have to live in a corridor!
MP: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.
EI: Well when I say "house" it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to US.
GC: We were evicted from *our* hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!
TG: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.
MP: Cardboard box?
TG: Aye.
MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!
GC: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!
TG: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.
EI: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, (pause for laughter), eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."
MP: But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
Why? Do you have inside poop on their infrastructure?
No. But the number of people reporting wifi issues with their 2013 MBA s on discussions.apple.com thread 5100655 is worrying. Works fine with latest Airport gear (hence comment).
The Wifi update has not helped the vast majority, although it did solve other issues. Really hope apple get it sorted as it's a brilliant little laptop.
This was long before the imagewriter came out. You might want to learn a bit about computing history.
In my day the boss printer was a teletype printer. It could do up to 100 cpm and was tireless. There was a little dodad on the side where you could create a little paper tape of what you wanted it to send, and then when you were ready, you could feed the paper tape into the printer and somewhere else it would print out... it was magical.
These were especially nice if you only wanted to communicate in upper case.
Line...printer? Dude, printers use lasers. The early civilizations used the 72dpi ImageWriter.
The "line printer" he mentioned was a chain printer that used ink ribbons. Lasers weren't even out of the laboratory back then.
By the time lasers were in printers was about mid '70s. IBM offered the first one. It could go through a ream of paper so fast that if you bypassed the interlock and failed to close the top of the printer, it would fill the top half of the room with paper before gravity could pull the paper to the floor.
It was the mid '80s before laser printers were available for the small business and weren't much faster then the old chain printers, but could do various fonts and graphics and do them much sharper and very quietly.
my school used a teletype machine that was hooked up to a system at Stanford so we could do math problems when I was in third grade. We thought THAT was cool. Then the calculators came out, but I used the HP calculators, those were the most advanced ones back then. Ah, the Good Ol Days. I remember when 5.25 inch floppys were single sided, and then they went to double sided, WHAT A technology leap, then 5MB hard drives came out and people thought their feces came out gift wrapped. Then 10MB hard drives, they were something like $5K for one of those, so anytime someone complains about the price of something, I just laugh.
Heck, for the longest time, the average computer would be $5K, then it went down to $3.5K, now it's $1500.
I remember when a word processor, spreadsheet app was $400 and thought THAT was outrageous.
People need to quit complaining and look at how affordable computers are these days.
Thanks for the memories. My first personal computer used 8" floppies. Each held 250K of data. The 10MB Hard disks were really expensive. Here's a ad from back in the day. For the $3398 you did not get an inclosure or a power supply. But most importantly, you still had to buy a controller board. There were really slow access devices, but compared to the alternative they seemed incredibly fast!
In my day the boss printer was a teletype printer. It could do up to 100 cpm and was tireless. There was a little dodad on the side where you could create a little paper tape of what you wanted it to send, and then when you were ready, you could feed the paper tape into the printer and somewhere else it would print out... it was magical.
These were especially nice if you only wanted to communicate in upper case.
I used the Paper Tape (DECTape) to actually store programs... I used a KSR33 with tape reader to bootstrap my 6502 based robot via an RS232 line, and then upload any handpatched code while we debugged the robot. This allowed me to boot my robot away from it's RS232 nipple to my RSX system. (the KSR was nominally more portable;-). EPROM was too expensive to load from, and I didn't want to have a floppy drive (this was before 5 1/4" 8" drives were heavy and power hungry) mounted on the robot.
I'm not old as dirt, but I was around when dirt was made.
Comments
This was long before the imagewriter came out. You might want to learn a bit about computing history.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Suddenly Newton
My dad showed me this mechanical analog calculator called a slide rule. It was used during the early Pleistocene era. It's how they built the pyramids.
Your Dad was lucky to have a slide rule. My dad had stone tablets with all mathematical calculations carved into it by the babylonians to plot the path of the stars in heavens. And his dad had to approximate long division using sticks and bundles of sticks...
(apologies and ob. reference to Monty Python... the mother of all 'we had it toof in my day' riffs)
http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/monty-python-four-yorkshiremen.html
Quote:
Michael Palin: Ahh.. Very passable, this, very passable.
Graham Chapman: Nothing like a good glass of Chateau de Chassilier wine, ay Gessiah?
Terry Gilliam: You're right there Obediah.
Eric Idle: Who'd a thought thirty years ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?
MP: Aye. In them days, we'd a' been glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.
GC: A cup ' COLD tea.
EI: Without milk or sugar.
TG: OR tea!
MP: In a filthy, cracked cup.
EI: We never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
GC: The best WE could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
TG: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
MP: Aye. BECAUSE we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness."
EI: 'E was right. I was happier then and I had NOTHIN'. We used to live in this tiiiny old house, with greaaaaat big holes in the roof.
GC: House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!
TG: You were lucky to have a ROOM! *We* used to have to live in a corridor!
MP: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.
EI: Well when I say "house" it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to US.
GC: We were evicted from *our* hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!
TG: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.
MP: Cardboard box?
TG: Aye.
MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!
GC: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!
TG: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.
EI: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, (pause for laughter), eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."
MP: But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
ALL: Nope, nope.
No. But the number of people reporting wifi issues with their 2013 MBA s on discussions.apple.com thread 5100655 is worrying. Works fine with latest Airport gear (hence comment).
The Wifi update has not helped the vast majority, although it did solve other issues. Really hope apple get it sorted as it's a brilliant little laptop.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PScooter63
B... b-b-but Windows RT! For free!
/s
THAT'S what I was thinking... FREE Surface RT, a computer so reviled by coders that hackers don't even write exploits for it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jragosta
This was long before the imagewriter came out. You might want to learn a bit about computing history.
In my day the boss printer was a teletype printer. It could do up to 100 cpm and was tireless. There was a little dodad on the side where you could create a little paper tape of what you wanted it to send, and then when you were ready, you could feed the paper tape into the printer and somewhere else it would print out... it was magical.
These were especially nice if you only wanted to communicate in upper case.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Suddenly Newton
Line...printer? Dude, printers use lasers. The early civilizations used the 72dpi ImageWriter.
The "line printer" he mentioned was a chain printer that used ink ribbons. Lasers weren't even out of the laboratory back then.
By the time lasers were in printers was about mid '70s. IBM offered the first one. It could go through a ream of paper so fast that if you bypassed the interlock and failed to close the top of the printer, it would fill the top half of the room with paper before gravity could pull the paper to the floor.
It was the mid '80s before laser printers were available for the small business and weren't much faster then the old chain printers, but could do various fonts and graphics and do them much sharper and very quietly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by drblank
my school used a teletype machine that was hooked up to a system at Stanford so we could do math problems when I was in third grade. We thought THAT was cool. Then the calculators came out, but I used the HP calculators, those were the most advanced ones back then. Ah, the Good Ol Days. I remember when 5.25 inch floppys were single sided, and then they went to double sided, WHAT A technology leap, then 5MB hard drives came out and people thought their feces came out gift wrapped. Then 10MB hard drives, they were something like $5K for one of those, so anytime someone complains about the price of something, I just laugh.
Heck, for the longest time, the average computer would be $5K, then it went down to $3.5K, now it's $1500.
I remember when a word processor, spreadsheet app was $400 and thought THAT was outrageous.
People need to quit complaining and look at how affordable computers are these days.
Thanks for the memories. My first personal computer used 8" floppies. Each held 250K of data. The 10MB Hard disks were really expensive. Here's a ad from back in the day. For the $3398 you did not get an inclosure or a power supply. But most importantly, you still had to buy a controller board. There were really slow access devices, but compared to the alternative they seemed incredibly fast!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Macky the Macky
In my day the boss printer was a teletype printer. It could do up to 100 cpm and was tireless. There was a little dodad on the side where you could create a little paper tape of what you wanted it to send, and then when you were ready, you could feed the paper tape into the printer and somewhere else it would print out... it was magical.
These were especially nice if you only wanted to communicate in upper case.
I used the Paper Tape (DECTape) to actually store programs... I used a KSR33 with tape reader to bootstrap my 6502 based robot via an RS232 line, and then upload any handpatched code while we debugged the robot. This allowed me to boot my robot away from it's RS232 nipple to my RSX system. (the KSR was nominally more portable;-). EPROM was too expensive to load from, and I didn't want to have a floppy drive (this was before 5 1/4" 8" drives were heavy and power hungry) mounted on the robot.
I'm not old as dirt, but I was around when dirt was made.